Mail for Mr. V

I am not quite on the ball with Halloween card-mailing this year, but I have a few things ready to send out.  I'll be getting just a few cards mailed today, I have a tiny box of cards and candy ready for my older niece and my nephew, and I had the book Where Is Baby's Pumpkin?  shipped to little niece Bianca a couple days ago to mark her first Halloween.  (The online book preview showed the baby peeking around an orange gingham curtain--

--and how could I have resisted?!)  Today's outgoing mail also includes a combination Halloween-thank you card for Mr. V, one of my fifth and sixth grade teachers.  He was one of my favorites and one of the best.  I've found what I'm hoping is really his address and have now offered my long-overdue thanks, which makes me happy.  

Mr. V was a sharp dresser and loved dogs and baseball--this was the era of the mid-late 1980s New York Mets and Darryl Strawberry, of whom there was a poster on one of Mr. V's classroom walls--and if I'm remembering correctly, the snazzy red car in the teachers' parking lot was his--but we students loved him because he cared about us, enjoyed us, and was simply one of the good ones.  He was the first teacher who really encouraged my art skills.  I painted or drew a picture of my Beagle in his class one day, and he not only praised it, but also took it over to a teacher who was visiting his room at the time--the equally wonderful Mr. M--and showed it off to him too.  Tradition at our elementary school was that each year, a couple of the sixth grade students were selected to illustrate the cover of the yearbook.  Instead of simply telling me in class the next day that I had been one of the two chosen student-artists, he knocked on the door of the other teacher's classroom I was in at the time--this time, dear Mr. G's--and asked if he could speak to me for a moment--He wants to talk to me?!  In the hall?!?  What did I do?!  I didn't do anything!  When I stepped into the hall, I found my best friend standing beside him, adding to the pure thrill seconds later when Mr. V announced that she and I would be the ones designing the yearbook cover.  He could have just waited to tell us in class, of course, just as he could have notified us separately, but no:  Instead he created a moment, and it was, clearly, a memorable one.  It is that kind of "small" kindness that stays with a person.  

Fifth grade was the year of our using microscopes for the first time too, and he shared our excitement as we saw insects and who-knows-what-else up-close for the very first time.  When I asked him after class one day where he bought the tiny lights for the microscopes we used in class, he answered at-length, but all I remember now is that he said that even the little Christmas tree string lights' bulbs would work.  That was the first year science ever interested me:  I asked my parents for both a cookbook and a microscope that Christmas.  There remains the feeling, almost thirty years later, that we all went through the fifth grade together:  He experienced it right along with us, as it should be.  And my gratitude is much bigger than I could ever express in a greeting card, but he'll be getting one in the mail this week anyway, and I hope it brightens his day as he brightened so many of mine.  

♥

Silence for the Lunch Ladies

One of my favorite teachers in the fifth and sixth grade was Mr. M. He is one of those people who makes me happy just by existing. You know about the Mr. Ms in the world, I'm sure, and how you smile when they come to mind and how you are both purely grateful that God thought them up and continually delighted just knowing that they are out there somewhere. My Mr. M was one of the "cool teachers," and he was, I think now, born to work with kids. I never saw him angry or exasperated or looking even remotely stressed during all his teaching days, and when he was disappointed in one of us, he reprimanded us privately but effectively, losing neither his cool nor any of our fondness for him.

Only slightly taller than we were, he would often sit on his desk to teach class, and like all good teachers, he was learning right along with us. In the fall of 1988, Bobby McFerrin's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" was on the radio constantly, and in class one day, Mr. M wondered aloud about one of the lyrics. "'The landlord say your rent is late, he may have to litigate,'" he quoted to us that morning. "I can kind of tell from the rest of the song what that means, but I don't know what 'litigate' really means, do you?" And as we called out our guesses, Mr. M reached for a dictionary and read the definition aloud. Just like that, he had discovered what the word meant! He hadn't know a second ago, but then he used the dictionary, and it helped him figure it out! This was how you learned.

In another class, we were supposed to have recorded ourselves reading something on a cassette tape player, and when Mr. M finished playing one student's recording for us, he went to turn off the recorder only to hear the girl continuing to talk about something related. It was about her grandfather, I remember, and how much she thought of him. "Oh, that's nothing, you don't have to listen to that!" she rushed to tell him as we all listened to her tape, but Mr. M shook his head and said, "You have nothing to be embarrassed about. That's how everyone should feel about their grandparents." And since he said it--Since it was Mr. M saying it--no one laughed at her, and instead we all thought about his words. Twenty-four years later, that is all I remember about Bobbi Rae: She admired her grandfather and was embarrassed and Mr. M made it better. This was how you treated people.

The hardest subjects he covered in those late 1980s classrooms were ones in which he clearly wished he didn't have the life experience that he did: Missed opportunities. Regret. Mr. M had had been a star athlete in high school and college and had had the opportunity to try out for the 1984 summer Olympics, but he didn't. He just didn't. We were now in his class five years later, but we all remembered the pep rally in the school cafeteria our little elementary school had held in his honor in 1983. I had never given it any thought after that. I doubt any of us had. But there we sat in Mr. M's classroom one day listening as he wondered aloud, while perched on top of his desk, why he hadn't tried. "What was I thinking?" he asked us. "And now I'll never know." Whenever we were blessed by such opportunities in our own lives, he told us, we needed to be brave and to see how far we could go with them and chase our dreams as hard as we could. We were not quite uncomfortable as we sat in silence watching Mr. M gaze off into the distance over our heads, his mind seeing Olympic glory that his eyes never had, but we were saddened. Our Mr. M was so wonderful, surely he could have done anything he put his mind to! Why hadn't he? It was hard for all of us to understand, and we sat together in our rows of desks in front of him a little longer, letting it all sink in, remembering the American flags and "Sam the Olympic Eagle" mascot coloring book pages we had colored for his pep rally years before. This was how you learned from someone else's mistake.

The last day before our school's Christmas vacation began in 1988, there was a rap on the door of Mr. G's room right before our sixth grade class was to head down to the cafeteria for lunch, and we all looked up to find Mr. M bounding into the room looking more mischievous than usual. "I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. G," he greeted our startled teacher, "But I've got an idea I want to run by your students. I just thought of a really good Christmas present we can give the lunch ladies!" We twisted around in our chairs, curious and already smiling along with him. We giggled as we listened to his plan, and even Mr. G smiled as Mr. M used his last few minutes of class time going over his idea with us. Minutes later, we all marched silently into the cafeteria, our entire sixth grade class joined by a few younger grade levels' classes, as well, a couple hundred of us making not one sound as we sat ourselves at the long brown fold-down tables and joined the line for milk, juice, and hot foods. The cafeteria staff was puzzled, but as instructed by Mr. M, we didn't let our poker faces slip, and we remained silent throughout our thirty-minute meal. Silent! A school cafeteria filled with ten, eleven, and twelve-year-old kids just a couple hours before their Christmas vacation started: Silent! By the time we were to line up to return to our classrooms again, the lunch ladies had come out from all their work stations to stand in front of us waiting to see how this rare and much-appreciated easy-on-their-ears lunch period would end. We looked to Mr. M for our cue, and when he grinned and nodded, we knew the moment had come. "MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!" we all shouted to the cafeteria staff, and our hardworking lunch ladies laughed as they realized this lovely half-hour of peace and quiet had been our gift to them. It had been Mr. M's idea, of course, but we were so thrilled with ourselves, you'd never have guessed it as we noisily chattered about it on our way back upstairs. This was how you loved people.

Many of us made the trip back to our elementary school to stop in and see him and some other favorites once we started junior high the following year . And some of my former classmates' children are likely being taught by Mr. M now. I sent him a letter my freshman year of college to tell him just how much we had loved him and his classes as kids. Mr. M is still working in our small town school district, and a recent news item in my hometown newspaper brought him to mind and made me want to write to him again, now that I am old enough to articulate why we all remember our time with him back in the 80s so fondly. The letter I send him next week will include a few old and new photos and more than a few memories, one of which will surely be our Christmas '88 silence for the lunch ladies. This was how you touched us. This was how you made us better. This was how you made a difference. This was how you were one of the cool teachers. ♥

Mr. G

The summer between fifth and sixth grade, I spent a day crying because I hadn’t gotten the teacher I’d wanted for the upcoming school year. I had wanted—everyone had wanted—Mr. S, aka The Cool Teacher, a man in his thirties who sometimes gave out candy for correct answers and showed movies in class. My best friends would all be with him, but I had been assigned to Mr. G. Mr. G! He was ancient, at least sixty years old! He wore a suit jacket and a bow tie!  I cried all day, begging my mom to have me switched to Mr. S’s class. The night before the first day of school, I cried some more, called my friends so I could wallow in their pity for me, and wrote my woes in my diary.

My diary entry for the first day of sixth grade doesn’t include a word about Mr. G or any “torcher” from the day at all. I very clearly remember the last day of that school year, however, because I ended it by crying to Mr. G that I would miss him and that I didn’t want to go to junior high. In the "last will and testament" section of our sixth grade graduation booklet the PTA always produced, my own entry didn't bequest prized possessions to friends still at the school or to classmates with whom I would soon be starting middle school.  I had instead left "lots of laughs and a big smile to Mr. G."  He had, of course, become one of my favorite teachers.

Mr. G appeared much older than he was, and he was quite frail, but he didn’t sleep through his classes as had been rumored. He kept a bell on his desk and would ring it to get our attention, to announce the end of our test-taking time, to get us quiet, and to keep us on-task in general. He always seemed genuinely puzzled when he would try to ring it and find it stuffed with wadded-up paper towels. Despite our hijinks, Mr. G believed that we were all good kids, and he wanted us to believe it, too, and to live up to it. He valued good manners, good posture, and good penmanship. He lamented disorganized desks and deducted points for messy work. When we would draw maps in Geography, our grades suffered if the blue crayon-strokes that marked the lakes and oceans had obviously been applied in different directions. “Of course it matters!” he would say, astonished that we felt otherwise, when we argued with him. He taught us how to diagram sentences, although none of the other teachers at the school were doing that with their classes. When the visiting music teacher punished me for something by making me stand against the bulletin board with my arms in the air, it was Mr. G who, returning early to his class room to find me standing in front of the wall with aching arms above my head, instantly cried out to the music teacher, “Valerie would never do anything to deserve that!” and told me I could take my seat. When another teacher lined us up to paddle us because a couple of students had behaved badly for a substitute, Mr. G. stepped into the hallway and talked him out of it. In times of corporal punishment, Mr. G never paddled us, and he rarely rose his voice to us either, and still we all somehow knew that he was the strictest teacher in the building.

Old-school and demanding, Mr. G was not quite grandfatherly toward his eleven-year-old charges, but he was a kind and gentle man. He would begin each day by writing a quotation on the chalkboard. A cross-stitch sampler was tacked to the bulletin board beside his desk that read, “Live your life one day at a time and make it a masterpiece.” Next to it was a black and white photograph of a young man in a suit and tie writing a letter. I asked him once if it was him in the photograph and he only smiled. When a boy in class made an off-color remark to a girl who’d asked to go to the restroom, Mr. G was outraged and gave him a lecture about the acceptable way to speak to—and about—young ladies. I walked over to his desk once with my assignment in-hand and got as far as saying, “I know this is a stupid question, but—“ before he cut me off by responding, in the sharpest tone he would ever use with me, “Valerie, no question is stupid if you don’t know the answer.”

And he learned from us, as well. The other sixth grade class—and probably every other class in the whole school—was participating in the book order program, but because Mr. G refused to get involved, we could only look on enviously as our friends in Mr. S’s class selected books and posters and calendars from the colorful brochures every few weeks. Mr. G had been burned by the book order once years before, he told us: Something had gone wrong with the shipment and he hadn’t been pleased with the service, so he never bothered with it again. We grumbled about this for awhile before hitting upon the words that would change his mind. “You have to give them a second chance!” we told him indignantly. “You don’t give up just because something doesn’t work the first time!” He told us we were absolutely right, and soon we were all looking through the little catalogs. When a girl picked an almost-dead housefly off of the classroom windowsill to see if she could revive it, Mr. G launched into a tirade about germs and hygiene and only stopped when he saw that the girl was crying. “You didn’t need to YELL at me!” she choked out as he led her over to the sink beside the coat rack. “I was TRYING to be NICE!” We all watched and waited for Mr. G’s reaction. When it came, it was so quiet, we had to strain to hear it. “You’re right, Jennifer. There was no need for me to yell at you. I’m sorry.” The fly couldn’t be saved, but the moment could be—and was.

The last day of school, after hours of playing Bingo in the gym, laughing at each other’s responses to questions posed to us by the PTA for the “Class of ’89 Yearbook,” winning candy at the end-of-year carnival out on the blacktop, and trying to blend into the cafeteria walls during the dance, we were herded back to our homerooms for dismissal. Walking back to Mr. G’s room for the very last time, it all hit me and I began to cry. Mr. G didn’t know what to do with me. “Valerie, Valerie!” he kept saying, looking baffled and rather embarrassed. It was younger, hipper Mr. S who knew to hug me and tell me I’d love junior high and could visit anytime. 
 
I sent Mr. G a long letter soon after I started the seventh grade. He called me on the phone to thank me. When I teasingly asked him if he’d found any grammatical errors in my letter, he laughed and explained that concerns about grammar were always outweighed by the joy of having been remembered by a friend. He also told me that he’d vote for me if I ever ran for President. We talked for quite awhile, but those two moments of laughter are all I remember now. He had a few heart surgeries in the months following our conversation, I learned, and he retired soon after. We, the neon spandex-clad “Class of ‘89” had been his last group of kids and his last full year of teaching.

My junior year of high school, my English teacher started class by asking, “Now, how many of you had Mr. G in the sixth grade? It helps me figure out who’s learned what, and how well.” Instead of simply raising our hands, we School of Mr. G alum spontaneously burst into cheers and applause.